1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to wireless communication; and, more particularly, to wireless access points in a packet switched network.
2. Related Art
In a wireless local area network, wireless access points are conveniently used in wide variety of public and private environments, to provide wireless routing services to a plurality of mobile wireless end point devices. Typically, these routing services connect mobile wireless end point devices to a backbone network. One of the prominent backbone networks is Internet, another being Intranet. Thus, today wireless access points provide wireless access to the Internet in may public places such as restaurants, air ports, public buildings as well as at homes. Often a plurality of wireless access points is bridged to provide additional coverage area. Mobile end point wireless devices include personal or laptop computers, servers, set top boxes and handheld data/communication devices. The communication between wireless access points and the end point wireless devices occur on the basis of predefined sets of rules or protocols.
Channel conditions that include number of associated mobile wireless end point devices within a cell, bandwidth usage, QOS (Quality of Service), priority of service, interferences and noises, create performance bottlenecks in the wireless local area network. The wireless access points, in these situations, are unable to provide the necessary bits per second transfer rate to the mobile wireless end point devices and the mobile end users face problems such as slow speeds and broken connections. These channel conditions vary dynamically over a period of time, in public environments such as restaurants and airports, depending upon the above mentioned factors. For example, a mobile end user communicating using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) may face drag in voice and disconnections periodically.
These and other limitations and deficiencies associated with the related art may be more fully appreciated by those skilled in the art after comparing such related art with various aspects of the present invention as set forth herein with reference to the figures.